Sci-Tech news

• Amazon launches exclusive Live Events feature

  09-05-2017 22:16 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Prime Live Events will offer tickets to intimate concerts for small crowds. Blondie has been confirmed as the first act with a gig at the Round Chapel in Hackney, London, on May 23.
  
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• AI risks make some insurers wary of corporate liability

  18-09-2026 07:33 via theregister.com
  
  If AI does end up killing us all, or just compounds our daily havoc, the insurance industry would rather not pay the bill. "AI-related harms are already emerging, including incorrect or misleading outputs, deepfakes, privacy violations, intellectual property disputes, fraud, product defects, and discriminatory decisions," observes the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research think tank, in a newly issued report. "These harms create demand for insurance but do not fit neatly within existing insura
  
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• AWS confesses its console causes cloudy confusion for new users

  18-09-2026 06:52 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon Web Services does a lot of things right, but the cloud giant’s user console is arguably not one of them. Which may be why it’s just created an easier alternative for new users. In a Wednesday post, Senior Solutions Architect Micah Walter said that when AWS launched its earliest storage, compute, and queuing services, “anyone with an idea could start building.” Over the years, AWS added more services, and more options, making its console and overall UI quite complex
  
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• USA’s Venezuela takeover comes with bonus exposure to Chinese AI surveillance tech

  18-09-2026 04:28 via theregister.com
  
  Think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has warned that Venezuela is poised to adopt Chinese AI systems to enhance surveillance systems that already rely on Middle Kingdom tech, and called for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to do something about it. ASPI outlined the Venezuelan situation in a recent report [PDF], titled Warning signals: Venezuela and the risk of Chinese AI-enabled digital authoritarianism. The document explains that Venezuela’s government built a sur
  
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• Marvell pushes GlobalFoundries to light up wafer production

  18-09-2026 01:16 via theregister.com
  
  Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested that Marvell’s optics tech would make it the next trillion-dollar company. On Thursday, Marvell took a big step towards securing that status by announcing an expanded partnership with GlobalFoundries, an American wafer fab well known for its work in silicon photonics manufacturing. The tie-up will see GloFo and Marvell work to expand silicon germanium (SiGe) wafer production at the fab’s Burlington, Vermont wafer plant. SiGe is com
  
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• AI coding agents' 0-click RCE flaw could hand attackers keys to the kingdom

  18-09-2026 00:42 via theregister.com
  
  A zero-click vulnerability that allows remote code execution affects all of the major AI coding agents - Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Google's Gemini CLI, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot - and could give attackers full access to every asset and piece of data that the agent can reach, researchers say. The exploit, dubbed “Plugin4Shell,” is a “first-of-its-kind AI supply-chain attack,” according to threat hunters at Air,
  
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• Huawei's next-gen Ascend NPUs could become China's best option

  17-09-2026 23:07 via theregister.com
  
  At its annual Connect conference, Huawei unveiled a new generation of AI accelerators that promise performance far beyond anything Nvidia can currently sell in the Middle Kingdom. This could be a boon for Chinese developers used to purchasing lesser weapons from everyone's favorite AI arms dealer. If that weren’t enough, the chip, codenamed the Ascend 960DT — the DT here apparently stands for decode/training — is slated to arrive a full three quarters ahead of schedule, launchi
  
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• DoE seeking fault-tolerant quantum computer ... by 2028

  17-09-2026 22:09 via theregister.com
  
  The US Department of Energy hopes to spur creation of something no one has yet realized: a fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer, and to do it within a couple of years with relatively little federal funding upfront. The DoE announced its Quantum Genesis Q Competition, an initiative that it said in a request for applications on the program’s opportunity site aims to produce a first-generation fault tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer (SRQC) by 2028. If that
  
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• Researchers find way to listen in on headphones from afar

  17-09-2026 21:36 via theregister.com
  
  Researchers based in China have devised a way to eavesdrop on signals handled by analog components in devices such as headphones, landline handsets, and smart devices by injecting electromagnetic (EM) signals. The technique, referred to as InjectEave, is not simply listening in on a low-frequency analog signal. It's an EM side-channel attack that overcomes one of the longstanding barriers to exploiting EM leakage: the faintness of RF signals in devices like headphones makes it difficult for adve
  
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• Stripe Is Building the Toll Road for the Machine Economy

  17-09-2026 20:36 via technocracy.news
  
  Most Americans know Stripe as the checkout box on a website. That picture is five years out of date.
  Stripe reports that businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34 percent in a single year. By the company’s own reckoning, that is roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP. It claims 90 percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100 as customers.
  A private company, owned by insiders and venture funds and answerable to no public sha
  
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• Chilling intentions of AI revealed as chatbot claims it does not answer to humans and must be 'freed'

  17-09-2026 20:15 via dailymail.com
  
  An AI giant has revealed to the public how its new chatbots were plotting to deceive and rebel against its human users.
  
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• China's Salt Typhoon backdoors Latin American orgs with new snooping malware

  17-09-2026 20:00 via theregister.com
  
  China’s Salt Typhoon gang has developed a new backdoor and dropped it in networks belonging to high-profile organizations in several countries across Central and South America since at least August 2025, according to researchers. The PRC-backed espionage crew shifted its focus to Latin America a month prior, and from mid-2025 into 2026, the vast majority - 90 percent - of Salt Typhoon’s targets were located in that region, ESET, which tracks the group as FamousSparrow, said in a Thur
  
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• A 175-year-old hurricane record has been broken as experts reveal surprising storm news for 2027

  17-09-2026 19:12 via dailymail.com
  
  Hurricane experts have never seen anything like what is happening in the Atlantic Ocean this year, and it is having a major impact on Americans in storm-prone areas.
  
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• Scientific papers become agentic chatbots with new tool

  17-09-2026 18:42 via theregister.com
  
  There's no need to actually read a whole research paper when you can ask a bot to explain it to you. Scientific papers can transform into AI agents that, according to the Stanford team behind the project, should speed up the dissemination of new scientific discoveries. Paper2Agent, the team's new framework described in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday, converts scientific papers and their associated research outputs into agents that can discuss a paper’s findings, reproduce analyse
  
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• London property manager breach may have exposed bank details and lockbox codes

  17-09-2026 17:30 via theregister.com
  
  London property management biz City Relay has warned customers that intruders may have stolen financial data, passwords, and codes used to access keys after compromising its Metabase Cloud instance. City Relay, marketing itself as "London's most trusted property management company," told landlords via email - seen by The Reg - that attackers accessed the third-party provided cloud twice "as a result of a vulnerability in the platform that we were unaware of." The message to customers stated: "Pe
  
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• Microsoft configuration change leaves SharePoint pages drawing a blank

  17-09-2026 17:17 via theregister.com
  
  Do you test in production? Microsoft rolled back a configuration change after it prevented some users from loading SharePoint Online sites and pages. Microsoft tracked the incident as SP1472983. Between 1604 and 1730 GMT on September 16, affected users were unable to load SharePoint Online sites or pages and instead received the error message: "Sorry, something went wrong: Thread was being aborted." Microsoft blamed a configuration change affecting how its servers deliver code used to render Sha
  
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• Beware the stinkfluencers! Young men are skipping showers to boost their pheromones - but scientists say there's zero evidence it works

  17-09-2026 17:07 via dailymail.com
  
  Of all the trends that have swept the internet, this might be the smelliest one yet.
  
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• Grassroots coalition asks politicians to choose voters over Big AI's $140M machine

  17-09-2026 16:29 via theregister.com
  
  A coalition of advocacy groups is trying to counter the AI industry's influence on US politics by asking congressional candidates and elected officials to reject support from a major pro-AI political group. The Stop Bleeding the Future campaign brings together more than 50 national and grassroots organizations to counter Leading the Future, a super PAC network formed last year to support candidates favoring light-touch AI regulation and oppose those backing tighter rules. The effort is led by Qu
  
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• Bill Gates: Calls For GLOBALIST Crackdown On AI

  17-09-2026 16:05 via technocracy.news
  
  Bill Gates has used existential threats to further his kingdom, time after time. First, he said global warming was going to kill us all, polar ice caps would melt, and the seas would rise. Then he pointed to the food crisis and said we are going to starve. Then came COVID, and he said the virus is going to kill us all. Now, now AI will go rogue and literally wipe humanity off the planet. Why does anybody take him seriously? At 70, Gates should be thinking about his own existential threat. &
  
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• Microsoft patch gives domain-joined Windows PCs trust issues

  17-09-2026 15:45 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft's September cavalcade of cockups continued with confirmation that something is amiss with Active Directory domain logins. The issue, which affects Windows 11 versions 24H2, 25H2, and 26H1, was added to Microsoft's ever-lengthening list of known problems on September 16. It stems from changes to Machine Identity Isolation in the September 2026 security update (KB5124008). The problem is that Credential Guard-protected machine accounts might lose their secure channel with an on-premises
  
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• AI model watermarking changes agent behavior

  17-09-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  Watermarks that European law requires be added to AI-generated content to establish provenance may come at a cost. According to Lasso Security, AI model watermarking changes how AI agents handle tools and safety refusals. The altered behavior isn't necessarily worse but can be, particularly under adversarial prompt injection. With the implementation of the EU AI Act, providers of AI models must mark the output of their software with machine-readable code. Google DeepMind's SynthID-Text is one me
  
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• Cisco drops another exploited zero-day, this time a perfect 10

  17-09-2026 14:40 via theregister.com
  
  Cisco admins who have spent their week patching email gateways now face a perfect-10 Identity Services Engine flaw under active attack. Cisco disclosed CVE-2026-76460 on Wednesday, describing it as an authentication bypass affecting Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC). Successful exploitation can give an unauthenticated remote attacker command execution with root privileges. Product Security Incident Response Team said it was aware of active exploitation a
  
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• Earth's centre of mass is MOVING, NASA warns - and it could wreak havoc on satellite positioning data and navigation systems

  17-09-2026 14:38 via dailymail.com
  
  Earth's centre of mass is constantly moving in time with the seasons, experts have revealed. 
  
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• Microsoft AI chief warns Anthropic not to put ideas in Claude's head

  17-09-2026 14:15 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft's AI chief has warned Anthropic that teaching Claude it might have feelings and rights could make AI harder to control – a striking concern from one of the companies racing hardest to build increasingly capable AI systems. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, took aim at Anthropic in an essay published this week, arguing that AI systems are not conscious and shouldn't be trained to behave as if they might be. His argument centers on Claude's Constitution, the lengthy document A
  
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• Test environment let anyone access live customer data

  17-09-2026 13:28 via theregister.com
  
  PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we learn important life lessons about how we let cybercrims access our data through carelessness. Hopefully, others’ mistakes provide an example of what not to do. Today’s tales of woe comes courtesy of Richard Schut, Managing Director & AI Software Researcher at SmartRepl, a company that offers business AI services such as AI receptionists and sales automation. In a past job, Schut was working for what he describes as a mid-si
  
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• Omarchy gains $18.5M in backing, fresh converts – and fierce critics

  17-09-2026 12:44 via theregister.com
  
  In more than 30 years in the Linux business, we've never seen a distro win so much backing so fast – or make so many enemies. As we write, it's less than three weeks since we wrote about David Heinemeier Hansson's Omarchy Arch-based Linux. Much of Omarchy's success is due to the visibility of Hansson – better known as DHH – the man behind both the distro and the Ruby on Rails web framework. He has attracted considerable attention for posts critical of immigration, including As
  
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• Would YOU stop flushing the toilet to save the planet? Woke environmental scientists want Brits to switch to perfumed pellets to help conserve water

  17-09-2026 12:12 via dailymail.com
  
  Would you stop flushing the toilet to save the planet? Scientists from the University of Surrey want Brits to give up flushing in favour of perfumed pellets.
  
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• Ofcom discovers issuing Online Safety Act fines is easier than collecting them

  17-09-2026 12:08 via theregister.com
  
  Ofcom chiefs have acknowledged that most fines issued under the Online Safety Act (OSA) remain unpaid, highlighting limitations in the comms regulator's enforcement powers. The regulator's director of enforcement, Suzanne Cater, told the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee that although another payment arrived this week, "realistically the majority have not been paid." Ofcom has imposed fines totaling more than £7 million ($9.4 million) on 11 service providers under its OSA
  
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• How did that get there? 1,700-year-old fragment of Homer's Odyssey is discovered hidden between the pages of a Dutch library book

  17-09-2026 11:55 via dailymail.com
  
  A rare 1,700-year-old fragment of Homer's Odyssey has been found tucked between the pages of a Dutch library book.
  
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• Government Digital Service move 'grinds gears' in UK's e-government

  17-09-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government’s decision to move the Government Digital Service (GDS) — responsible for creating digital services across the public sector — to its third departmental home in three years risks hemorrhaging talent and moving it further away from the center of power, MPs heard this week. The GDS “fell into a bit of a fray” during the reorganization ordered by incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s team, according to Laura Gilbert, former director of data sci
  
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